Council of Despair: The CFR on America’s Public Schools

How are America’s public schools doing? Lousy, says a report from the Council on Foreign Relations, the most influential Establishment organization.

Defenders of private education have been saying this for half a century. The CFR has finally acknowledged the problem.

The CFR’s “task force” has announced that the failure of tax-funded K-12 education is the #1 threat to America’s position in the world.

The United States’ failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country’s ability to thrive in a global economy and maintain its leadership role, finds a new Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)–sponsored Independent Task Force report on U.S. Education Reform and National Security.

“Educational failure puts the United States’ future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk,” warns the Task Force, chaired by Joel I. Klein, former head of New York City public schools, and Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. secretary of state. The country “will not be able to keep pace—much less lead—globally unless it moves to fix the problems it has allowed to fester for too long,” argues the Task Force.

The report notes that while the United States invests more in K-12 public education than many other developed countries, its students are ill prepared to compete with their global peers. According to the results of the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international assessment that measures the performance of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science every three years, U.S. students rank fourteenth in reading, twenty-fifth in math, and seventeenth in science compared to students in other industrialized countries.

This sounds bad. It is bad. The problem is, all this has been known for years. Nothing changes except cost per student, which rises. Reform after reform is proposed. A few are begun. The performance of the students falls. The cost per student rises.

To call for another reform without the announcing a new system of rewarding success and punishing failure is an exercise in futility. No such system of sanctions is ever implemented. The teachers union will not allow it.

Here are some data on student performance.

More than 25 percent of students fail to graduate from high school in four years; for African-American and Hispanic students, this number is approaching 40 percent.

In civics, only a quarter of U.S. students are proficient or better on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Although the United States is a nation of immigrants, roughly eight in ten Americans speak only English and a decreasing number of schools are teaching foreign languages.

A recent report by ACT, the not-for-profit testing organization, found that only 22 percent of U.S. high school students met “college ready” standards in all of their core subjects; these figures are even lower for African-American and Hispanic students.

The College Board reported that even among college-bound seniors, only 43 percent met college-ready standards, meaning that more college students need to take remedial courses.

The CFR report offers some blather about what is needed. It offers no plan to get the present system revamped from top to bottom.

“Human capital will determine power in the current century, and the failure to produce that capital will undermine America’s security,” the report states. “Large, undereducated swaths of the population damage the ability of the United States to physically defend itself, protect its secure information, conduct diplomacy, and grow its economy.”

There is a solution: stop all tax funding of education. But the CFR is not going to propose that. Ever. The Establishment wants control over education. Taxation is its tool.

The Task Force believes that its message and recommendations “can reshape education in the United States and put this country on track to be an educational, economic, military, and diplomatic global leader.”

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16 thoughts on “Council of Despair: The CFR on America’s Public Schools”

http://www.petition2congress.c... Go to this website and sign the petition to vet Obama and check into his eligibility to be president. Send this to everybody on your mailing list. Ask them to do the same. We must keep up the pressure on congress till they do the right thing. If the link doesn't work, cut and paste.

As usual, if the government is involved, quality goes down. The Education dept. should be shut down and the power returned to the states. The people of the states have a vested interest in their children's education. Get rid of tenure at all levels and you will see education improve.

That's another reason for school vouchers for those who cannot afford a private school. Homeschooling is good, but there are too many who have to work and can't put in the time it takes to do that.
Amen, also, to ladybug re:tenure. Let them keep their positions according to merit, not length of time in that position. Get rid of the NEA; that org. has not been for the good of the children in a very, very long time.

I home school so my children are better educated. Even with that I still have to pour over the lessons prior to teaching to make sure they do not skue the information they provide. It is very time consuming. I also feel that the Teachers Union is only for the Teachers. I understand that if someone would fight to get you better pay and benefits why not support them. But what I don't understand is a Teacher should put the kids first. Like you said, if they do a great job it should be theirs as long as they continue to do that, but to hold a high position because of length of time on the job is wrong. Tenure sucks and was founded in the premise, I am here now and there is nothing anyone can do me. Just plain wrong. Like I said I home school. My kids say the Pledge of the United States every morning and I also make them aware of our IPOTUS. With any luck maybe I can raise a great President, either way they will be Great Americans.

Why one would think that the CFR would be Jumping for Joy; after all between them and the Bilderbergs, and the Tri-lateral commision, American exceptionallism has been under attack since WWII. Don't believe it? check their Membership rosters. Every Secretary of State comes off of it. If they are not members (Hillary Clinton) then a relative is (Bill Clinton). The CFR is a Globalist club not really interested in the welfare of anyone, especially children that are overpopulating the planet as they see it.

Not that dumb. Dumb enough to go along but smart enough to keep the economy prosperous for them to leach of. That is the key balance but it is impossible to reach and they are facing the consequences of a century of centralizing policies and the only answer they know is more centralization.

They're stuck and once the government is no longer able to send checks to buy votes they are doomed. The day is coming and it could have happened to a more deserving bunch.

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Until we go back to teaching our children AND their parents that there are consequences & repercussions from bad behavior. Allowing kids to go unpunished for bad behavior, such as cursing at the teacher, or even cursing at their parents, gives them the idea that they can be that way, & nothing is going to happen. Then when they have to get out & deal with the REAL world, they are totally incapable of doing so. They get away with cheating on tests, bullying others, & also with not learning anything. They just keep getting passed on to the next grade. We have raised a generation of people most of whom can't read, & don't understand why they can't get a job that pays $50,000. a year. By allowing a child to advance without doing what is required is a form of abuse,in my opinion. And, parents who allow their children to get away with bad behavior, & threaten to sue if punishment IS meted out, or even physically attack the teacher or school official, should be put in jail, & made to take classes on how to properly train a child. There's no need for beating a child, but a time out, or a swat on the seat is not going to kill them. When they end up in prison for the rest of their lives, they look back, & think, 'Gee, I wish someone had told about the consequences!

First we must get rid of the interfering Child Protective Services who will not allow parents to properly discipline their children. Mine was taken because I spanked him for kicking his dog. They then fed him an assortment of prescriptions including Adderol which mummified his mind. By the time I got him back (cost over $5000) he was indoctrinated in their message that "if you spank me they will put you in jail." I had to take him out of the United States to get him off heir cocktail of medicines, put him in private school in a foreign country and demonstrate that I could indeed discipline him appropriately for bad behavior before he straightened out.

Frankly, I think it's a smokescreen. American public schools are performing exactly the way the CFR and other elitist organizations want them to, and are producing precisely the product required–dumbed-down students leading to a dumbed-down population. This is just a tactic to gain more power and control, as Dr. North said. The CFR is trying to distance itself from the cause of the problem while proposing more authoritarian, statist solutions.

The essence of homeschooling is not a re-creation of the formal classroom environment simply moved into the home with the parents serving as unpaid schoolteachers. Homeschooling in its essence is the passing down of life knowledge and skills through a mentoring process in which the parent is the natural mentor. This doesn't have to involve a lot of educational "materials". Life is educational. Kids who get to experience Life become better educated than kids who are largely raised in the artificial environment of the classroom. This classroom environment comes to us courtesy of late 19th- and early 20th-century educational gurus like John Dewey who strove to remake the world in his own image by moulding the next generation according to his own ideas. Have you ever been around homeschooled kids and noticed how much better they relate to adults and to the real world? That's because they've grown up in a real, versus artificial, environment. Check it out.

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